Tag Archives: proficiency-based learning

This year I am embarking on a new challenge. I am teaching two classes of AP Human Geography and am helping to facilitate our whole-school transition to Proficiency-Based Learning (PBL). PBL is similar to, but not the same as, Standards-Based Grading.

How did we get here? It was like that moment when you get a trickle from the water hose and wonder if something is wrong so, for some reason, you put your face up close and look into the hose. Then, right as you do that, the person bending the hose lets it go and water explodes onto your face and into your nose, mouth, and eyes. That’s how we got here. At first a few of us were trying it in our own classes–a Fine Arts teacher, a couple of Math teachers, and me. Slowly more teachers, seeing the results in the classroom and facing the persistent struggle of traditional grading, began to adopt it and tweak for their own classrooms. Then, like the hose metaphor, our principal let go of the bend in the hose, and said the whole school is going to PBL. Those of us prepared for the water did okay, but others nearly drowned amidst the deluge and felt like they were building a boat in the middle of an ocean. At the same time, that principal left our school after 10 years to work at the district central office. Last year was a rough year.

What did I learn? A lot. I learned the value of stepping up to lead even if you are afraid. I learned about the amazing resilience of our staff and students. I learned that my own love of leaping into a project and learning about it along the way is not a model for whole school leadership. I learned to talk less and listen more. I learned in practice what I already knew in theory which is the smartest answer is the whole room (or school) full of people–not one person individually.

How will I use what I learned in my new role this year? I am going to make sign to put up in my office that says:

-You have answers, but not all of them. Know what you know and be willing to ask questions.

-Believe in the strength of this community and its ability to weather storms. That said, don’t create unnecessary storms.

-Ask yourself: “What is the worst thing that could happen as a result of our best idea?” If that thing is deal breaker, find a new “best idea.”

-How can we achieve consensus?

-To what extent is our system sustainable?

-What questions do I need to be asking right now? Who can answer them?

-Who is left out? How can we include them?

What is my monster? I think my biggest monster is my self-doubt and my false belief that other people’s certainty is wisdom. I hope I learn to trust in what I know right now, always keep listening and learning, and never confuse my own certainty for wisdom.

We just finished our first quarter with school-wide proficiency-based learning (PBL). Our most recent survey indicated that the majority of the staff believe in the principles of PBL, but nearly half the staff are struggling (and/or are frustrated) with our implementation.

Here are a few of the biggest struggles/frustrations I have heard or overheard and my attempt to answer them:

My grades are inflated

This was a common phrase after teachers entered their grades for parent-teacher conferences. I would follow this up with a question:

Did the assessments that students took or performed measure what I wanted them to know about be able to do?

If the answer is ‘yes,’ then give your students (and yourself) credit for their hard work and learning. Is it possible your grades were deflated in previous years?

If the answer is ‘no,’then it is time to rethink your assessment design and make sure whatever test, project, etc is measuring what you want students to know and be able to do. Spend the time doing backwards design.

Shift in thinking: One of the main shifts in thinking in moving to PBL is accepting that (and working toward) all students can achieve mastery. It is unlikely that all students will achieve mastery in all standards, but the belief that they can and that their ability to do so is the central part of your job is an essential belief of proficiency-based learning.

Students are gaming the system

It seems this is the same subset of teachers that believe their grades are inflated. Apparently students are refusing to take new assessments when they have a high score or a student has not come to class/school in awhile and their “M’s” (missing assignments in Jumprope) do not count against their score. I think a couple questions might be useful here:

Where is the assessment taking place–home or class?

If most or all of what you assess is homework this works against students with challenging home lives or added responsibilities. You also may not be able to tell who is copying work from another student so that their level of understanding shown in their score would not be accurate. Generally, it is better to have students perform the assessment in class to avoid these issues.

Is it possible to have the student take the assessment they missed during class time?

I know this is a tough call. Having the student miss new information in order to take the past assessment is not ideal, but is it better than having no information at all about where the student is? I think it is better. I have lots of review videos on-line for students who miss the interactive lecture so that is a good time for students to take assessments in class.

Can you articulate the importance of the assessment to the student so that they have a buy in to take it based on information they will get about their own level of understanding? Another option is to schedule the assessment during colloquium in order for them not to miss new material.

Shift in thinking: Another shift in thinking in the transition to PBL is that grades (or scores) are meant to be a conversation between the teacher and the learner. The teacher is no longer the supreme evaluator on high who seeks to reward or punish students with scores. Rather, the teacher is an advocate for the student’s learning and works to help the student understand why this learning is meaningful to them and what kind of feedback they will get when they perform the task assigned.

This is too much work

I will not argue that this system is easy. It isn’t. Yet, the difference I found between traditional grading and PBL (aka SBG) is that the work is meaningful to both students and teachers. There is specific data to talk about the student’s level of understanding and specific actions to take to improve understanding and show new learning. To me, the work is worth it.

Shift in thinking: One of the main shifts for me to lighten my load a bit was that I did not have to assess everything. I structure my class with a lot of practice built in that is designed specifically to prepare them for the assessment they will take at the end. Students are growing in their advocacy of their own learning and asking questions they have about the material to be sure they are prepared for the unit assessment. There is a lot of front end work to give the learning back to students, but it is well worth it in the long run.

As our school makes the shift to proficiency-based learning or PBL (aka standards-based grading), I am reminded about the struggles of big, systematic change. Changing a system is easy on the surface when you have a hierarchical structure. A top down edict is made and those below follow because their job depends on it. This kind of change often appears deeper than it actually is. Most people will comply with rules they don’t understand or do not agree with, but such change is fragile.

Right now we have teachers who deeply believe in PBL as a system that helps learners know where they are in their learning, where they need to go, and how to get there. Other teachers are open to trying this system and are starting to see the benefits, but are feeling the burden of the front-end work that the system requires (it is a ton of work). Still others are trying to fit their old system into the new one to have the appearance that they are complying with a administrative decision.

I’ve been in all of these stages more than once in my 13 years of teaching. In this instance, I am a teacher who has jumped in to the PBL water and has learned to swim. To me, I believe in PBL as both a reflection of the latest cognitive science around learning and as a system of agency and accountability for the learners we serve.

I am where I am not because of an administrative decision, but through the genuine struggles of my own action research, reading the research of others, and lots of trial and error (shout out to the poor students in my first iteration of PBL…thank you for your patience and honest feedback). I came to this because I saw problems in my practice that I wanted to solve.

Problem #1: My students didn’t see or understand the structure of the class and how to use the structure to help them be successful.

So many of our students physically move themselves from class to class. They sit down and do the thing that is asked of them and then move again when the bell rings. They go through the motions and likely struggle to see the point of it all. Teachers in the mean time, work to incorporate the science of learning, the science of engagement and motivation, and the art of incorporating the lives and thoughts of the young people in our class in creating a curriculum or lesson plan that is meaningful. Yet, many of us rarely share how all of these things went into our lessons with students.

This year, more than any other in the past, I am trying to make the structure and shape of the class more clear and share with students the art and science of it all so that their brains can use the structure to help them learn. With freshman in my AP Human Geography, the structure is more overt and teacher created, but in my Honors Women’s Studies class students help create the structures as we go and learn to independently assess themselves on their learning. It is the long-term way to practice gradual release of responsibility.

My freshman learned through this first unit how everything I create works to help prepare them for the assessment at the end. I give students a “student guide” (thanks Myron Duerck for this idea) at the beginning of each unit. This is essentially the road map for the unit and the study guide for the assessment. Each learning document we use in class helps students create pages in their own “textbook” to help them prepare for the assessments.

The brain is a lot more useful when it knows where it is going. Give your students road map.

Problem #2: My students didn’t understand how the brain learns at a deeper level and how to help themselves move through the levels of understanding.

Another aspect of my teaching that has changed with PBL is that I work daily with students to help them understand how knowledge moves from learning to knowing (from working memory to long-term memory). We often start class with a warm-up that is meant to connect to their prior knowledge or prior experience. We move from there to the recall/remembering part of the class–for APHG this is the terms we will focus on for the day. Then we learn to work with the terms using visual or examples and we end with applying the terms in a new way to see how well students understood them. I also formatively assess students at these levels to help them see assessment as a check-in or learning tool and not an evaluation.

I also ask students to create questions at different levels so they can start to use this kind of thinking when they review for assessments. So many of our students enter Lindblom (in 7th or 9th grades) with a belief that learning is memorized and then tested. Your intelligence came from memorizing and answering questions that could be promptly forgotten minutes after the assessment was completed.

In APHG all of our summative assessments are cumulative. It sends the message to students that the concepts are important enough not to learn just for one month and then forget, but that they can become a part of them. Students can literally own their learning and use it to learn more.

For my Women’s Studies class, I go even further and talk about the act of creating new information/interpretations to contribute to the world. Our biggest questions are what does this mean for me? What should I do/make/say with what I know?(With freshmen, we get there by the end of the year, with a lot of scaffolding and structure)

These kinds of questions and this kind of classroom model was influenced by my experience at the Educon conferences I’ve attended and through the wisdom and humility of the people with whom I work at Lindblom and follow on twitter. A special shout out to Chris Lehmann the principal of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. I am certain he does not know the influence he has had on my teaching. You can find more out about his amazingness here, here, and here.

Problem #3: I was working A LOT harder than my students (and, as a result, I was likely the one learning the most in my classes)

I know I will get a lot of “amens” with this problem. It seemed I was spending all my weekends and after school hours planning and giving feedback and planning and giving feedback. I was exhausted and did not get the full joy of seeing students own their own learning. It sucked.

My first shift away from this was in reading Robyn Jackson’s book Never Work Harder Than Your Students. It taught me to explicitly teach students how to practice metacognition and reflect on their own learning in order to improve. My students never had to do this because I did it for them. So when I passed them on to their next teacher or professor, they were still passive learners.

Now I make time for regular reflection and as the year progresses, students are able to identify where they need to improve and offer ideas for how to show me their new understanding of newly developed skill. They also learn how to study effectively in order to limit the amount of revisions and relearning they have to do. I think I used to see reflections as tangential instead of as a core part of the learning process.

For Women’s Studies, students are creating their own projects to show their learning and assessing themselves on the project (with my guidance and through conferences).

I created my PBL system to address these problems of practice and increase my ability to use assessment as a conversation starter rather than an evaluative end number or letter.

When we are making systemic changes, it is critical that we identify and largely agree upon the problems of practice we share and how the system works to solve those problems. Without the why of the system, the how is often another form of passive compliance rather than a transformative event.

My school shifted to a new grading system and new grading software this year. A number of us in the building had already made the shift to standards-based grading a few years ago, but many in the building had not. Last year, our principal announced that the whole school would be switching to what we have named Proficiency-Based Learning (PBL) for the 2015-2016 school year and, the week before teachers were to meet, that same principal took an amazing opportunity to help run the district.

So we arrived Monday for a tearful farewell and then promptly got to work on learning how to make this shift from traditional grading to PBL. To say it was messy would be an understatement. There were teachers in all stages of preparation having very different displays of anxiety–some shut down, some shouted out, and others mumbled gallows humor under their breath. It occurred to me later that we are experiencing the kind of anxiety and fear that our must vulnerable students feel on a daily basis. What a great gift for us to be reminded of this feeling first hand. I’m sure many of us, if not all of us, have created lives that very rarely push us to do things that make us feel uncomfortable or fragile in front of others whose respect we seek out. In this way we were freshmen last week.

I also connected our varied emotions to the PBL roll out to the system itself. It is a system based on on the fundamental belief that if we are learning challenging material, then not all of us will understand perfectly right away. Some of us will be further along because of our prior knowledge of the system and others will be just starting out. Our message to students in our system is that it is the learning that matters most, not the day/time at which you learned it. Similarly, if we gave a test to teachers yesterday on their knowledge of PBL and its application some would perform well and others would struggle on certain parts. It would not at all tell us how smart these people are, but rather it would tell us where they are in their understanding and application of the system. This is incredibly useful information. We would provide the supports they need to better understand and then we would check in again to see where they are.

Our system is based on Marzano’s 1-4 scale. Right now, some teachers are at a 2 (developing) and moving to a 3 (achieving). I likely started at a 3, but might not have developed as fast as they have and I remain at a 3 at the end of the week. It doesn’t matter that I arrived at a 3 earlier than others, it matters that we are all moving to our goal of a 4. In the classroom, the more students who move to a 3, the more the entire room rises and each person can improve the understanding and application of those around them. In short, I am better when my colleagues are better. I already see this happening in the kinds of conversations we are having as a staff. They are more focused on how students can show their learning and not behaviors and class rules.

If we are confident enough to be vulnerable in the classroom and talk about how our new learning helped us better understand the anxieties that students face every day and helped us live our belief that we learn as much from failure as we do from success, the young people in our care will respond to this and true community can be the outcome. I am excited to see it happen.